Beware of deceptive online reviews

The first online feedback to factor into one of my purchases was undoubtedly on eBay, probably in about 2001. The numbers next to a seller’s name let you know two things quickly: how many reviews users had logged on the seller and what percentage of those reviews were positive. If two comparable items were for sale and one seller had only a handful of reviews, but a second seller had thousands, well, odds were you’d buy from the seller with the stronger eBay history.

Years later, many more purchases are made online -- $225.5 billion in 2012, up from $32.6 billion in 2001, according to the Department of Commerce -- and some 31 percent of consumers now read online reviews before making a purchase, according to technology research firm Gartner. In its research, the firm cites another study suggesting that consumers are 63 percent more likely to buy products from a site with user reviews, and that a very high number of reviews can make a purchase even more likely.

This may sound familiar to you. It does, I admit, sound a bit like the way I shop online -- at least for products not reviewed by Consumer Reports, to which I have a digital subscription.

Think about what this means for businesses. It means that they’ve got strong incentives to solicit positive reviews, and plenty of them. And if they’re not getting those reviews organically, they’ve also got an incentive to round them up through some other means.

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Cornell University research from 2012 found that 2 percent to 6 percent of online reviews on sites like hotels.com, Orbitz and TripAdvisor could be presumed to be fake or deceptive. The Harvard Business Review wrote only last month that a study of Boston-area Yelp restaurant reviews revealed that about 16 percent were fake.

That some reviews on the Web might not be trustworthy isn’t a foreign idea to Jay Solomon, owner of Jay’s Patio Cafes in Greenwood Village and the Highlands and the Hot Ticket Cafe at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

“As an example,” he says, “someone applied for a job and didn’t get the job, and proceeded to sit down and write an inflammatory review about my restaurant.”

He’s aware of the existence of paid, inflationary reviews, too. “No one’s called me and said, ‘We can do this,’ but I’ve seen ads come my way,” he says, adding that a solicitor called offering to somehow promote already existing positive reviews of his restaurants. Such companies know better than to be easily sought out online. But it’s not hard to find individuals willing to write fake reviews.

Fiverr is a website where people can offer services for $5. All kinds of stuff. One person will draw your logo on their hand and photograph a thumbs-up. Another person will rap a 16-line verse about anything you want. Someone in Pakistan will do three hours of data entry work -- again, all for $5. Feel weird yet?

As I’m writing this, my very first search found several users offering to write reviews.

Here’s the come-on from user justintime: “Hi! I want to write a review for your ebook or product exactly as you like it for $5. Not only that ... if you’re not 100 percent satisfied, I’ll write you a second review for free! Let me write you a contextual review that will make your customers want to buy! My last gig had 200 successful purchased with 100 percent satisfaction.”

TripAdvisor advertises a zero-tolerance policy on fake reviews, but the site was also recently pranked by someone who listed a nonexistent restaurant, allegedly housed in an old fishing boat in England. Fueled by fake reviews, the listing stayed on the site long enough to become the 29th-ranked restaurant in the town of Brixham -- out of 64. On Amazon.com, posting mostly harmless fake reviews has become something of a pastime for some netizens. The sport caught on to the extent that Amazon has itself compiled a list of some of the funniest -- and left the reviews live on the site.

Managing user-generated content is hard for any website manager, let alone on sites as popular as TripAdvisor, Yelp and Amazon. And in the short-term, their incentive to cull the fake reviews is not nearly as strong as is the average user’s incentive to rely on them less.

How not to fall for suspicious posts

Not all online reviews are bad, of course -- but it’s important to read them critically if you’re going to spend your dollars based on what they say.

If it sounds like a commercial, be skeptical.

Does the reviewer use the full name of the restaurant, service or product -- Dave’s Magnificent Kale House on Broadway -- over and over again? Excessive branding and all-positive reviews should be immediate red flags.

More red flags:

Longer reviews and multiple exclamation points are often marks of fake reviews, according to researchers at Northwestern University.

Check out the user’s other posts.

Are they all positive? Are they all 5s or 1s? Or does the user sound like a real person?

Find reviews on multiple sites.

Some sites might be better than others at policing their reviews. If a product has overwhelmingly different reviews on different sites, something might be up.

Ignore the numbers.

Read the content of the reviews, not the number of stars given. The content will be more revealing, and you may find that many of the five- or one-star reviews meet some of the suspicious criteria above.